Ex-doctor sentenced to death in Nebraska

OMAHA, Neb. — A former doctor convicted in the revenge killings of four people connected to a Nebraska medical school was sentenced Friday to death.

A three-judge panel handed down the sentence against Anthony Garcia, 45, of Terre Haute, Ind. The judges, who heard arguments earlier this year during the sentencing phase of Garcia’s trial, also had the option of sentencing him to life in prison.

Garcia was convicted in two attacks that occurred five years apart on families connected to Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, where Garcia once worked.

Investigators said that in 2008, Garcia fatally stabbed 11-year-old Thomas Hunter, the son of university faculty member Dr. William Hunter. Garcia also was convicted of killing the family’s housekeeper, 57-year-old Shirlee Sherman, at the family’s home in an upscale Omaha neighborhood. Police struggled to find a suspect in the killings, and the case went cold in the following years.

That changed five years later, with the 2013 Mother’s Day deaths of another Creighton pathology doctor, Roger Brumback, and his wife, Mary, in their Omaha home. Police recognized many similarities in the 2008 and 2013 killings, and Garcia became a suspect. He was arrested two months later in a traffic stop in southern Illinois.

Prosecutors argued the killings were motivated by Garcia’s long-simmering rage over being fired in 2001 by Hunter and Brumback from the Creighton medical school’s residency program.